Uplifting thoughts

Blogging has clearly been light recently. The new occupation is fun, exciting and rewarding, but time- and energy-consuming. (No, I'm not going to say what it is. Some people would start hyperventilating. And with Scotland being such a small place, I'm not dropping any more hints about my real identity.)

Anyway, I just came across these uplifting thoughts in my reading:

"It is to the Union we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences these great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; it has been to us all a copious foundation of national , social and personal happiness.

"I have not allowed myself, Sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this Government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union may be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroyed.

While the Union lasts we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day at lest that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind!

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!

Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Kingdom, now known and honoured throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a cross erased, polluted or obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty from the Union,' but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true British heart - Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!"

I've changed a couple of words, but it pretty well sums things up, doesn't it?

A hearty round of applause for naming the original speaker.